Category Archives: newsrooms

By 2017, we have found in other research that 66 percent of a sample of major European newspapers operate pay models, and prominent digital-born news publishers across the continent (including De Correspondent, El Diario, and the pioneering Mediapart) operate paid or membership models. Broadcasters generally don’t (though CNN plans to introducing digital subscriptions), but they benefit from still significant offline revenues and can treat online as a loss-leading brand extension.Most of the digital-born news publishers who have sought international expansion have neither subscribers, members, nor offline revenues to sustain their operations. They rely on digital advertising. As Jean-Christophe Potocki, general manager at HuffPost France told us: “If we don’t fight this battle, given our model, we’re dead. Diversification is to provide extra, but our model is advertising and we need to fight it directly.”Not all of these outlets will win this fight and be able to sustain itself on advertising alone (just as not every newspaper or niche news site will make pay models work). The challenges they face are clear, and include:low average revenues per user, especially with the move from desktop to mobile accelerating;the rise of programmatic advertising, widely seen as depressing CPMs for display advertising;the competition from large technology companies, most significantly Google and Facebook, that attract a large share of online advertising;the use of ad-blockers as users are frustrated by intrusive ads and long load times.

As President Donald Trump wages daily war against the press, millennials are subscribing to legacy news publications in record numbers—and at a growth rate, data suggests, far outpacing any other age group.Since November’s election, the New Yorker, for instance, has seen its number of new millennial subscribers more than double from over the same period a year earlier. According to the magazine’s figures, it has 106 percent more new subscribers in the 18-34 age range and 129 percent more from 25-34.The Atlantic has a similar story: since the election, its number of new subscribers aged 18-24 jumped 130 percent for print and digital subscriptions combined over the same period a year earlier, while 18-44 went up 70 percent.Newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times typically do not share specific subscriber data, but according to a Post spokesperson, its subscriber growth rate is highest among millennials. A New York Times representative relayed that the paper was “seeing similar trends” in subscriptions and pointed to public data on digital traffic that showed its online reach among millennials to be up 9 percent from the same period a year ago.Even The Wall Street Journal—not a paper usually known for being left around dorm rooms—said that it has doubled its student subscribers in the last year. And a spokesperson for the famously staid Economist reported, “We are seeing that the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups have been key drivers of new subscriptions.”

About four years ago, Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s top newspapers, was in free fall. The paper was experiencing depressed circulation, no digital revenue, and dwindling readership. When Fredric Káren took the job as editor-in-chief in 2013, the message from the board and the parent company, Scandinavian media conglomerate Schibsted Group, was clear: “Something radical had to be done to secure the newspaper’s future,” he recalls. Since then, SvD has gotten back on track by bringing a digital-first mentality into the newsroom. Káren talks a lot about how investing heavily in technology allowed the paper to move forward and regain profitability. Mostly, though, he says he owes the paper’s recovery to one thing: an algorithm that runs the news.

I’m delighted to let you know that today we have reached an important milestone in our efforts to rebalance the Guardian’s business model to offset the dramatic decline in advertising: the Guardian now has the financial support of more than 200,000 members. In addition, we have 185,000 subscribers and people are buying the paper on newsstands more regularly than we expected. After responding to lots of feedback from readers suggesting they would be happy to give money to support the Guardian’s journalism, w

What is PolitEcho?PolitEcho shows you the political biases of your Facebook friends and news feed. The app assigns each of your friends a score based on our prediction of their political leanings then displays a graph of your friend list. Then it calculates the political bias in the content of your news feed and compares it with the bias of your friends list to highlight possible differences between the two.

Facebook must create institutionalized pathways for journalists and policymakers to help shape any further changes to the algorithm. First steps could include more transparency about the business model driving these changes, incorporating opportunities for comment from members of civil society and the news industry, and creating an internal team dedicated to media ethics concerns, with an explicit mission statement driven by values rather than increasing clicks and views.

In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.

During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.

Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. (This analysis focused on the top performing link posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on Facebook. For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. View our data here.)

Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets.